The Game
Doki Doki Literature Club! '' Warning: This Page Contains Spoilers and Disturbing Content ''Doki Doki Literature Club! was developed and published by Team Salvato. It was released on September 22, 2017 on Steam, and through the Team Salvato website. Dan Salvato and his small team of developers created this free-to-play game, probably with the intention of gaining recognition for their development in order to secure funding for larger projects. The Team Salvato website also hosts an online store to purchase trinkets and tee shirts associated with Doki Doki characters and the team released a “fan pack” on Steam available for $9.99 which includes character art and the soundtrack. In December of 2017 Doki Doki was downloaded a total of 1 million times. Additionally, the game won IGN People’s Choice Award for Best Story, Best PC game, Best Adventure Game, and for being the Most Innovative. Doki Doki Literature Club! is a dating simulation visual novel where the player portrays a non-avatar high school boy. Similar to other visual novels, there are cute static backgrounds, cute avatars of characters who use facial expression animation, and large blocks of dialogue and text are meant to be read. The player names the boy protagonist (I chose DarthVader) and interacts with four high school girls in their afterschool Literature Club. Sayori is your next door neighbor and one of your best friends. Yuri is a quiet, shy and highly intelligent girl. Natsuki is an immature and hot headed girl. And Monika is the President of the Literature Club, which the girls make you join with them. At first, the game is a simple dating simulation. By targeting one girl to be your girlfriend, you should be able to unlock various narratives that will unfold and lead to a conclusion based on choices that you make. Conclusions tend to be either positive or negative, based on the overall tone of the game. In order to advance the Doki Doki story, the player needs to understand the literacy of the game. The controls are extremely simple: you must press the space bar, which loads text blocks at the bottom of the screen. Occasionally, it is required to use the mouse to click on specific choice buttons. Again, displaying skills of mastering complicated game controls is not the point of the game. The goal is to court one of the girls at a time by doing your Literature Club homework: crafting a poem. In order to gain more alone time with a specific girl, you need to choose words to put into your poems that she would respond to positively. You never see the poems that your character creates but every day you read the four girls’ poems in your literature club as well as various other interactions with each girl. By targeting Yuri there are unlocked special moments with her throughout act one of the video game and you can progress this narrative branch towards its completion. She is shy, quiet, and smart and we have chemistry together since we like reading. I assumed that once Yuri’s story was complete, I could reload the game and re-play the game making different selection to complete other narrative branches. The climax event seemed to be building towards a festival, where each member of the Literature Club would read one of their poems aloud to all of their classmates. Doki Doki differs from other visual novels in its narrative branching structure. There is one main branch of narrative to complete and the main character is never fulfilled in his quest to obtain a girlfriend. Side branches of narrative are never completed, and are not relevant to the overall meaning of the game. Instead of having Yuri as a girlfriend, the character of Monika pushes a depressed Sayori to commit suicide. After the main character’s declaration of love towards her, Sayori hangs herself in her bedroom, overcome with complicated emotions and shame. The screen fades to black, and the player assumes that they would restart the game in order to follow another narrative branch. Instead, the game continues simply by removing Sayori from the original storyline. “Glitches” appear in the game when the Sayori text is supposed to appear until new text overwrites the “glitch”. While the game seems to be restarting, the player cannot “skip ahead” text that was already displayed. This is not a new branch, it is a continuation, similar to de ja vu and something akin to a second act. The game must be played as if this is a new storyline. In the second act, Monika targets Yuri, the quiet girl who cuts herself to release her pain and emotion. Yuri cannot handle her overwhelming emotions and stabs herself to death in front of your character. For two days worth of game time Yuri speaks to you as she dies in coded text, over and over and over welcoming you to literature club and asking to spend time with you. Natsuki and Monika discover you and Yuri once the weekend in the game has passed and Monika deletes Yuri and Natsuki from the game file. She creates a world for just the player and herself. A world where she can have autonomy. In the first act, there was no choice to make a poem directed towards wooing Monika. Somehow she became sentient and deleted the other characters from the script of the game, allowing her to write her own version of Doki Doki where she is the only girl. (Just Monika.) In order to complete the game, the player needs to access the local files of the game in the Steam Library and delete the Monika character file. Doing so corrupts the script and renders the game unplayable. In order to replay for unique moments with the two other girls, the player needs to uninstall, reinstall and complete the game a series of two more times. Meaning in Doki Doki is constructed largely through subtext. In the first act, you read three weeks worth of poems (12 poems). In the second act, 2 weeks of poems (6 poems). The poems mimic the style and the mental acuity of their writer. Sayori’s first poem is one she wrote hurriedly in the morning before school: “Dear Sunshine The way you glow through my blinds in the morning It makes me feel like you missed me. Kissing my forehead to help me out of bed. Making me rub the sleepy from my eyes. Are you asking me to come out and play? Are you trusting me to wish away a rainy day? I look above. The sky is blue. It's a secret, but I trust you too. If it wasn't for you, I could sleep forever. But I'm not mad. I want breakfast.” Sayori’s bubbly and mothering demeanor seems to match the poem on a cursory glance. It’s about sunshine, and it was clearly written the in the morning in haste since Sayori is always late to school. However, the tone of the poem is bittersweet and expressed in phrases like “trusting me to wish away a rainy day,” “it’s a secret,” “I could sleep forever.” Even the “I want breakfast”, isn't an exclamation or a happy observation but reads like a sigh. Like a necessity of life, not an enjoyment. The poem points to the depression that is lurking beneath her surface and the poem ultimately embodies her bittersweet tendencies. Sayori’s last poem is obviously and glaringly disturbing. Upon reading the poem, the main character rushes to Sayori’s house only to find her dead in her bedroom. “'%' Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of my head. Get out of Get. Out. Of. My. Head. Get out of my head before I do what I know is best for you. Get out of my head before I listen to everything she said to me. Get out of my head before I show you how much I love you. Get out of my head before I finish writing this poem. But a poem is never actually finished. It just stops moving.”4 Fans complicate and interact with the game’s poems by posting in discussion forums about potential meaning and easter eggs symbolism. The user Kiju started the thread “Translating Wheel SPOILERS”. In the main text they write “A rotating wheel. (Passage of time?) Turning an axle. (Makes the world go 'round?) Grinding. (Slowing down?) Bolthead. (One thing keeps it all together?) Linear gearbox. (Time is linear, nothing changes) Falling sky. (The world ending?) ((With time continuing in a straight line, one event will cause everything to stop and "end"))….” The users annotations of meaning are contained within the parentheses. Users can comment on this thread to add suggestions, clarifications, and their own meaning. The fans are actively engaging with and creating the meaning of the game. In addition to the poems, meaning is also constructed through the interaction of narrative and gameplay. Monika’s space and her manipulation of game space is used to demonstrate her dominance and power. Monika begins to move out from behind the text block during the second act of the video game, after Sayori commits suicide (see Image 3). This signaling of space is disjarring, it’s a place that a video game character is not meant to be in since she is blocking the text from being read. The game’s code should have her position in front of the background image, but behind the text block. Additionally, after the death of Sayori, Monika stands in the places that Sayori stood in the first act. Monika symbolizes her move from passive actor to creator through pushing herself into the physical space when glitches begin to happen in the “code” and by “manipulating” the choices that the player is allowed to choose. The second act’s choice of who the main character wants to help get ready for the festival is always going to be Monika because your cursor cannot move towards the other choices. Finally, after deleting all of the other characters, Monika creates a whole new background and appears to be sitting at a table very close to the player. Her dominance of the screen is akin to her dominance of the game. The glitches in the second act are meant to be visualizations of the deletion of Sayori from the video game’s code. The code is visually beginning to break in certain points. The beginning of the second act mimics the first, but where Sayori once stood asking if she can walk to school with you is a pixelated cloud and unreadable text. This lasts for two dialogue rounds, and then self corrects to the protagonist being alone. Miscellaneous pixilation’s and disjunctive and disturbing imagery are layered into the text during the second act. It quickly appears, and then disappears. The pixilation and other glitches make the replay of the text without a skip ahead function bearable because the player is constantly expecting something disturbing to happen. The pixels narratively point to Monika’s ability to manipulate the game world as if she was a game designer. Ultimately, the protagonist has to completely break the game in order to win, never fulfilling his superficial want for a girlfriend and subverting the stereotypical romantic or erotic endings. Lastly, meaning is constructed through character development. Character development tends to be short, and very one sided to whomever you’ve chosen to target (and Monika, of course). All of the characters begin as stereotypes, shadows of themselves. As the game progresses, hints in the narrative point towards Sayori and Yuri having a darker and more complex side. Yuri specifically brings a pocket knife to a weekend hangout where the protagonist and Yuri create a banner for the Literature Club. It falls out of her pocket and she panics unreasonably when the protagonist sees it. When the protagonist leaves the room to get water, when you return Yuri is rolling down her sleeve. Later, in the second act, we learn that Yuri is a self-harmer. Through her actions and her hiding of her mental illness, Yuri demonstrates that people are complicated and rarely show you their whole self. We present ourselves in certain ways, as the nerdy one, the bubbly one, the mothering one, and we hide our true selves. If we take this at face value, then is ''Doki Doki ''critiquing critics who say that visual novels are fluffy and stereotypical?